Arouse the house?
what would that do?
only reveal my cherished secret and perhaps jeopardize the life of my husband.

Besides, they were my own near kin, remember, and so had some little claim upon my consideration, at least to the point of my not personally betraying them unless they menaced immediate and actual harm.
The escape by the window which would have been a difficult task for most women to perform, was easy enough for me.

I was brought up to wild ways you know, and the descent of a ladder forty feet long was a comparatively trivial thing for me to accomplish.

It was the tearing away from a life of silent peace, the reentrance of my soul into an atmosphere of sin and deadly plotting, that was the hard thing, the difficult dreadful thing which hung weights to my feet, and made me well nigh mad.

And it was this which at the sight of a policeman in the street led me to make an effort to escape.